Coming Soon To A Bar Near You: A Flavor Hack For Food And Drink

Typically, when you go to a tequila tasting, you taste tequila, right? You take it into your mouth, and even if your intention is to spit, you ingest some of the spirit. But the interesting thing about “taste,” as we all learned in biology class, is that humans can only identify a few distinct ones. Most of what we experience when tasting actually comes from scent – or more specifically, olfaction, as Harvard professor and serial inventor David Edwards can tell you.

Nimbus can add smoke flavor to a cocktail without lighting anything on fire.

Sensory Cloud

“You can identify about a trillion flavors,” Edwards says, noting that there are 404 olfactory receptors throughout the body – an incredibly sophisticated system that scientists are just now beginning to understand.

Edwards has spent decades exploring the world of olfaction, and after introducing several small-scale products to deliver scents over the years through his company Sensory Cloud, he rolled out a new personal scent cloud system called Nimbus at Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans this month. Resembling an egg timer, the battery-powered device creates a personal flavor cloud, using natural essences crafted into large droplets to emulate a specific flavor – like tequila.

I got a preview of the Nimbus ahead of Tales of the Cocktail, and sampled three Don Julio tequilas – blanco, anejo and reposado – without actually drinking anything. And it seemed pretty real.

This starter pack, for $95, lets you hack flavors.

Sensory Cloud

“Nimbus offers real food and drink experiences without ingestion,” Edwards says. In addition to the tequila tasting, the demonstration at Tales involved an easy way to add smoke to a cocktail—using a Nimbus filled with mesquite flavor—and turning a spoonful of tomato sauce into pizza using a Nimbus scented with oregano and yeast.

Currently, Nimbus is in active use at Café ArtScience, Edwards’ experiential restaurant in Cambridge and at Lounge Bohemia in London, where molecular mixologist Paul Tvaroh has been using it to change water into wine (sip a glass of water while inhaling a wine-scented Nimbus) and a rum cocktail scented with sea salt.

At Café ArtScience, bartender Ian Swindlehurst has been playing with dozens of different Nimbii, letting patrons play with the devices and using them to flavor his own creations as well.

“It’s fun because your one drink can now become 10 or 12 different ones,” Swindlehurst says. Try a burnt orange Nimbus with your gin martini for one sip, then try lime with another sip. Or maybe some smoke. “It opens another door,” he says, noting that it also keeps people off of their phones and having actual conversations – something unusual these days.

From my perspective, what is especially interesting is that the flavor is very real for a couple of seconds, then it vanishes. So unlike getting a smoked cocktail using actual smoke, which hangs around and maybe even floats over to your neighbor’s drinks, the scent is concentrated and powerful then gone.

While Edwards has launched Nimbus at Tales – starter kits are on sale for bars and restaurants, with a Nimbus shaker and four scents (lavender, mint, mesquite and vanilla) for $95, Sensory Cloud is not a booze company.

High-end cocktail bars and restaurants are instead a fun way to introduce the public to a much bigger idea. If his vision becomes a reality, in a few years, all of us will be carrying around scent shakers, to help with everything from craving control to anxiety –olfactory nutraceuticals, if you will.

“This is the only sense that goes straight to the limbic brain,” he says. “There is no more emotional sense…. We are passionately interested in the development of this new category. The ability to change my metabolism and my mind by brief smells of a scent is thrilling.”